


it could be a love song

by themorninglark



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Actors, Alternate Universe - Idols, Getting Together, Kita Shinsuke POV, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark
Summary: Shinsuke knows the voice before he sees the face. It’s an autumn kind of voice, the kind you could fall back on with a sigh like it’s a massive pile of crunchy red leaves. A voice that would be out of season, if not for the way the wind’s stirring outside.When the wind whistles like that,his grandmother used to say,you stop and listen, Shin-chan. Change is in the air.In which Kita Shinsuke picks up his guitar for the camera again, and Miya Osamu has dreams he's never told anyone.
Relationships: Kita Shinsuke/Miya Osamu
Comments: 22
Kudos: 109





	it could be a love song

**Author's Note:**

> I looped Goose House's live version of ["Egao no Hana"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K2X7Udb4bs) while writing this ♥
> 
> Epigraph: Sarah Kay, ["Love Poem #137"](https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/love-poem-137-15401)

I will wake you up early  
with my heavy heartbeat.  
You will say, _Can’t we just sleep in_ , and I will say,  
 _No, trust me. You don’t want to miss a thing._

Shinsuke knows the voice before he sees the face. It’s an autumn kind of voice, the kind you could fall back on with a sigh like it’s a massive pile of crunchy red leaves. A voice that would be out of season, if not for the way the wind’s stirring outside. _When the wind whistles like that,_ his grandmother used to say, _you stop and listen, Shin-chan. Change is in the air._

He is in the lobby near the vending machines, tuning the A string on his guitar, when he hears it.

“So you’re the one they got to substitute for Aran-kun.”

Shinsuke looks up at the same time Miya Osamu drops into a squat in front of the bench where he’s sitting, crosses his arms over his knees, and gazes up at him.

His hair is neat, but not styled. There’s no makeup on his face. It doesn’t look like he’s been to wardrobe yet, either. Miya Osamu, unadorned, is dressed like a college student in washed-out jeans, a forest green sweater that looks surprisingly homespun, and white Adidas sneakers, the only difference between him and the average college student being that there are pictures of him in those sneakers all over Shibuya. Shinsuke had seen one on the train this morning, on his way into the studio. Miya Osamu leaning against a wall, one hand tugging at the hem of his T-shirt, while his twin brother pulls on a jacket with a smirk on his face.

Shinsuke sets down his guitar and inclines his head into a small bow. “I’m Kita Shinsuke. It’s nice to meet you, Miya Osamu-kun.”

Osamu’s eyebrows shoot up. “Are you sure you’ve got the right twin?”

“Yes,” says Shinsuke.

Osamu stares at him in silence for a while. Shinsuke stares back. Finally, Osamu smiles. “Impressive.”

“I’m nothing special. They just wanted someone who could play guitar.”

“Not everyone can tell us apart so easily at first sight,” says Osamu. He opens his satchel and pulls out a bottle of peach Calpis, takes a drink. Shinsuke glimpses several bento boxes and a pudding cup stuffed inside his bag.

“I watched a lot of your performances to prepare for this,” he says.

“You watched a lot of our performances in two days?”

Shinsuke has heard it said that he is a starer. He is doing it again, he realises; if only because, as is so often the case, there is nothing to be said. _I only did what I needed to._ Does he really need to say something like that? It seems so obvious, not to mention unnecessary. Fortunately, Osamu seems content to fiddle with his bottle cap and watch Shinsuke in equal silence, the slightest curious tilt to his head.

“Samu,” someone calls, from further down the corridor.

Osamu unwinds himself, gets to his feet. “See you on set, Kita-san,” he says, and waves as he goes.

* * *

_Break a leg! Just not like me._

Aran had sent him the text in the morning, together with a crying emoji and a picture of his cast. Shinsuke comes back to it while he’s getting his makeup done.

 **kitashinsuke** : I just met Miya Osamu. He seems harmless.

 **acearan** : Ha.  
 **acearan** : You know what they say about the quiet ones.

They’ve dressed him in a red checked button-down shirt and khaki slacks. Distinctive enough to make him stand out from the extras. Not too bright that he’ll be louder than Miya Atsumu’s character, Kousaka Hiro, whose image colour—from what Shinsuke saw in wardrobe—appears to be all kinds of sunset shades.

> _INT. UNIVERSITY CAFETERIA – AFTERNOON._
> 
> _TANIZAKI SHINJI brings his tray of food over and takes a seat across the table from KOUSAKA HIRO, who is stabbing at his baby potatoes with a fork._

“You don’t sweat at all,” the makeup artist remarks.

Shinsuke glances up at him. “Is that inconvenient?”

“No, no.” He laughs. “It’s the opposite. These lights are hot, and sometimes people get nervous on the first day of shooting, but I haven’t had to wipe any of your sweat. Makes my job easier.”

Shinsuke lets the pages of his script fall shut on his lap, runs through Shinji’s lines in his head again, word by precise word. He looks down at his hands. Nails trimmed to hold a pick. Calluses on his left fingertips, not as rough as they should be. Playing once or twice a week for fun doesn’t give him the sort of fingers that the president of a light music club should have. Still, as Osamu had pointed out, he’d got the call to replace Aran just two days ago.

He is, at the very least, not out of practice. He has done everything he can, as proper as he can. That’s all.

With a final swoop of his eyebrow pencil, the makeup artist pronounces Shinsuke camera-ready. Shinsuke stands to nod his thanks, pick up his guitar and walk onto set.

The twins have the first scene of the day, and of the whole shoot. They’ve got use of the TV station’s canteen today to film a good chunk of the cafeteria scenes. Shinsuke walks in just in time to see Osamu, now in a tracksuit, pick up a carton of milk and throw it at his brother. It spatters all over his face. All the extras look up and stare. Osamu’s voice, low as it is when he bends over the table and leans towards Atsumu, carries across the entire set.

“Stop taking my things,” he says.

He stands up, slinging a tennis racket across his back and walking out of frame, and Director Kurosu calls _cut_. A production assistant appears with a washcloth and starts wiping down Atsumu’s face.

It was a good take. Shinsuke stands at the doorway to the canteen a few moments more, watching as both twins go over to join Director Kurosu by the cameras. Osamu doesn’t stay long, heading off to one side after a while to grab a sandwich from the snack tray and chat with Ginjima, but Atsumu lingers. He’s watching the video playback along with Director Kurosu, a furrow on his brow. A wardrobe runner hands him a brown jacket and he slips it on without taking his eyes off the camera.

_Atsumu is a little shit, but he’s more hardworking than anyone I’ve ever worked with. Between you and me, I think Osamu has more natural talent, but… Atsumu’s obsessed with getting better._

Shinsuke would have taken Aran’s word for it anyway. He’s known the twins since their first gig as children in a fabric softener commercial. Seeing Atsumu like this, though, Shinsuke understands what Aran meant.

Then Assistant Director Oomi waves Shinsuke over, and he goes to be briefed about the blocking and collect the tray of food he’ll be carrying in, while the crew set up the next shot for them both: a different table, a lighting adjustment for earlier in the day, a change of plastic flowers and a plate of baby potatoes for Hiro to stab.

As Shinsuke gets into position, he hears footsteps coming up beside him. “Hey. You must be my Shinji-senpai.”

There’s something about the way _senpai’s_ drawled out that would have made it clear which twin this was, even if Shinsuke didn’t already know. He turns to see Atsumu standing by the water dispenser, hands on his hips, surveying Shinsuke with an expression uncannily the mirror of Osamu’s earlier.

“Pleased to be working with you. I’m—“

“Kita Shinsuke-san. Aran-kun told us all about you.”

He’s still wearing the brown jacket. Kousaka Hiro is the kind of character who wears patches on his worn-out sleeve, along with his heart. It’s a little frayed and threadbare, nothing at all like Atsumu’s Shibuya billboard image, and the more Shinsuke looks at him, the more there is something oddly familiar about this Atsumu.

“This might sound strange,” he starts, “but have we met before?”

Atsumu raises his eyebrows.

“I sincerely apologise. I’m usually good at remembering people.”

“No, no, don’t worry about it. It’s been, what, almost ten years?”

“Ten years?” Shinsuke repeats.

“Since ‘Foxglove’.”

The glass of juice on Shinsuke’s tray wobbles. He takes a deep breath, exhales slowly. “Oh. Of course.”

It’s a distant, fuzzy memory—at least, that’s what another performer might say. Shinsuke hasn’t watched the music video for so long he might have forgotten where he’d stashed the DVD. Except he hasn’t. And it was the honest truth, when he told Atsumu his memory’s usually better, and so he sees it clear in his head: the shape of a boy against summer’s soft glow, pushing open a door surrounded by wisteria. Wearing a brown jacket. He had black hair then, a slighter frame and a rounder face. Shinsuke remembers the shape of his back more than anything.

He had not been involved in the filming. He’d only met the boy once, at one of the roadshows he did in a mall somewhere in Ikebukuro. They hadn’t even been introduced properly; Shinsuke only remembers his manager nudging him after the show and saying, _look, there’s the kid who was in your MV_.

“You were the boy in the cafe,” Shinsuke says. “Weren’t you?”

Atsumu grins. “I wasn’t much of an actor back then. Think I’m a bit better now. Though Samu will tell you different, that liar.”

A production assistant waves at them. “We’re ready for you, Atsumu-san, Kita-san.”

Atsumu raises his hand in acknowledgement, nods at Shinsuke and walks over to their cafeteria table, glancing off to the sidelines as he settles in. Shinsuke follows his gaze to see Osamu leaning against the far wall, watching.

“Action,” calls Director Kurosu. Shinsuke squares his shoulders, holds his tray steady, and enters the scene.

* * *

_Tell Me What You Want_ has all the ingredients of a massive crowd-pleasing hit. Shinsuke’s first read-through of the script had been enough to tell him abundantly as much. The season’s hottest breakout idols, the Miya twins, headlining their first drama would have been enough to sell any series—let alone one where they’re playing a dreamy drummer and an aloof tennis player, caught in a love triangle. There’s music, mistaken identity shenanigans, and a charming object of affections in the form of rising starlet Shirofuku Yukie, who on her first day on set got into a passionate argument with Osamu about the tastiest onigiri in the staff canteen, and thereafter proceeded to become best friends with him.

“Your leading lady seems to be getting on well with your brother,” Shinsuke observes one day, over a break.

They’re on set in the light music club room, waiting to shoot the next scene. From where Shinsuke’s standing by the window with his water bottle, he can see Osamu walk out of the main building and wave at Shirofuku.

Atsumu bangs out a jangly riff on the cymbals. “Typical. Everyone likes Samu better.”

“You don’t seem too bothered by that.”

“Hmm? Why would I be?”

Shinsuke says nothing, only shakes his head and smooths out a crease in his collar. They’ve put him in blue checks today. Checks seem to be Shinji’s thing.

“Do you know, when we were… I don’t know? Thirteen, or something? We were extras in this drama, and it was lunch break and I was eating on my own outside, and Samu came to me and said, _Tsumu, nobody likes you._ ”

Atsumu pitches his voice a little mellower when he says that. It’s a pitch-perfect impersonation of Osamu. And then he laughs, twirls his drumsticks in both hands and tilts his chair back.

“I mean, yeah, he’s right. But he blew off people who _actually_ wanted to eat with him to come sit with me. He’s just that kind of sucker.”

Down in the courtyard, Osamu and Shirofuku are blocking their next scene under a conveniently blossoming sakura tree. There’s a heavy-duty fan just out of frame, probably to blow the petals across Shirofuku’s face at an opportune moment for Osamu to pluck one from her hair.

“Anyway, Aoi-chan chooses Hiro in the show, so I win,” Atsumu says, grinning. Then Akagi comes in, and Shinsuke picks up his guitar while Akagi goes to the bass, and Atsumu counts them off into their warmup. If a spring breeze drifts pink past their open window, if Shinsuke glances up to look from time to time, there’s no camera here to capture any of that, for now.

* * *

In any case, it’s not as if Shinsuke has many chances to assess the truth of _everyone likes Samu better_ , least of all for himself. Most of Shinji-senpai’s scenes are with Hiro in the light music club. He only has one scene with Osamu in the whole thirteen-episode script, and they’re not scheduled to shoot till near the end of filming.

Still, the thing about not having scenes together is that Shinsuke gets to watch. Osamu is an assemblage of paradoxes, some funny, some fascinating. He doesn’t do that thing Atsumu does of obsessively watching and rewatching his scenes after filming, but if a take goes badly, he broods over it far longer than Atsumu does. He never raises his voice at anyone until Atsumu points out something he did wrong, and then the whole floor hears him. He’s quiet, until he isn’t.

Ginjima, who plays Kousaka Ren’s tennis partner and wingman, tells Shinsuke that once he was in a variety game show with the twins and it was _terrible._

“We were shooting a go-kart race, and Osamu bumped Atsumu, and they both overturned and had to do the forfeit. But then Atsumu said Osamu bumped him on _purpose_ , and _then_ Osamu kicked him in the shins, and they got into such a fight. The producer had to step in. And we had to redo the whole race!”

“What was the forfeit?” Shinsuke asks.

Ginjima scrunches up his face. “I don’t remember. Eating wasabi? Something like that.”

“Osamu doesn’t seem like he’d mind eating wasabi,” Shinsuke remarks.

“I think it was like, the _principle_ of the thing. But you’re right, Osamu eats everything.”

Shinsuke’s observed that. The way to Osamu’s heart is simple and paved in combini receipts. Pudding is a perennial favourite, but whenever one of the staff comes back from Family Mart with snacks, whether it’s melon pan, chips of assorted flavours or karaage, there’s always extra for Osamu. He never eats it all, though. There’s always some to share with Ginjima, with Shirofuku, with the makeup artists, the tennis advisor and the sound and wardrobe guys.

And it is always Osamu who keeps Atsumu’s portion for him if he’s filming. He brings it to him afterwards, stands and let Atsumu talk his ear off about what went right or wrong today. This, too, Shinsuke observes, though Osamu’s far from a passive listener; he never fails to affirm when Atsumu’s done something stupid. And occasionally, tell him he’s _kimoi_ when he does something genius.

Kindness, Shinsuke thinks, takes many forms.

* * *

They’re on the bus to Kanagawa, passing by a quiet stretch of highway lined with sycamores and blue skies, when Shinsuke feels a tap on his arm across the aisle.

“Kita-san,” Osamu whispers.

Shinsuke looks up, sets down the itinerary he’s reviewing. Ahead of him, Oomi’s talking with Shirofuku about the hiking scene where she trips and Atsumu catches her, the first scene they’re going to shoot in the mountains. How it is that the tennis club and music club both wind up in the same mountain on the same bonding trips at the same time, Shinsuke doesn’t know and doesn’t care to probe the scriptwriter.

“Why are we whispering?”

Osamu jerks his thumb backwards at the window seat next to him. “Tsumu’s sleeping. And I don’t want him to know he’s not getting first dibs on this.”

He holds something out to Shinsuke. It’s a bento box. Shinsuke looks blankly at it, then back up at Osamu, who nudges it into Shinsuke’s hands.

Shinsuke takes the box and pries off the lid. There are three onigiri inside, neatly wrapped and well-shaped. The smell of seaweed and rice, the quiet onward trundling of the bus, the fields outside—if he closed his eyes now, Shinsuke might imagine himself elsewhere, in another time, with his grandmother’s embrace at the end of the road.

“Thank you. Did you make these?” he asks.

Osamu leans towards him, cupping one hand round his mouth like he’s telling Shinsuke a secret. “Got up early to do it. I want you to try one.”

With an _itadakimasu_ under his breath, Shinsuke picks up an onigiri and takes a bite. _Ume._ Sweetness. Summertime in the countryside. And the rice, the flavour of it—

“It's good,” he says.

“Yeah?” Osamu’s face lights up. “That's high praise from you.”

“What makes you think I know anything about cooking?”

“Maybe you don't, but I bet you know something about rice.”

Shinsuke, about to take another bite of the onigiri, lowers his hand. There’s a smile on Osamu’s lips that’s nothing like his onscreen alter ego’s. If tennis heartthrob Kousaka Ren is a pond frosted over, Osamu is the melting water. That smile is the crack that breaks the ice in half.

“You know the Kita farm?” Shinsuke asks.

Osamu nods. He shifts so he’s facing Shinsuke now, his back to Atsumu and the window. “When I was seven, my father came back from a business trip to Hyogo. And he brought a bag of the year’s first rice back. It was the best rice I’d ever had. I still remember the taste of it. I’ve been dying to get you to try my onigiri, Kita-san.”

 _Ah._ Shinsuke takes his next mouthful slowly, savours each grain in his mouth. He does close his eyes, now, for a moment that feels like forever and not enough. When he opens them, Osamu’s still looking at him, hands resting in his lap as he leans sideways against his seat.

The late afternoon sun shimmers low above the mountains in the distance. Shinsuke finishes his onigiri, grain by grain, makes it last as long as he can before he puts the lid snugly back onto the bento box and returns it to Osamu, who’s doing wrist rotations idly as he gazes out the window.

“Are your wrists hurting?” Shinsuke asks.

Osamu slides the box back into his satchel. “A little bit. Why does Ren have to be a tennis player? I mean, I’m not exactly _not_ athletic, but I’ve never played tennis.”

“Give me your hand,” says Shinsuke.

Osamu, staring blankly at him, extends one hand. Shinsuke takes it. _Calluses._ Not in the same places as his. A tennis racket’s not the same as a guitar. Osamu makes it look natural enough, at least to Shinsuke’s untrained eye whenever he’s watching, but his hands give up their story easily; all the hours, all his patience.

“Keep your elbow straight,” Shinsuke murmurs, then turns Osamu’s palm down and bends his hand upward.

Osamu winces. “Ouch.”

“This is a wrist flexor stretch. It should help… does it hurt? Should I stop?”

“Yes. But no,” Osamu says. He offers his other hand, and Shinsuke does the same with it. Osamu sags in his seat and lets out a long sigh, shaking out both wrists.

“Thanks. Did you learn this from guitar?”

Shinsuke nods. “Also, I don’t think you’re supposed to use your wrist so much when playing tennis.”

“I know, I know,” Osamu brings his hands together, keeps his wrists locked as he makes a rough approximation of a backhand with an imaginary racket, mouth scrunched up in a frown. “Itsuki-kun keeps telling me off for that.”

“Itsuki-kun?”

“The tennis consultant. Oh, I guess you haven’t seen him around, since you don’t have so many scenes on the tennis set.”

“Thankfully not. I doubt I would have any more aptitude for the sport than you do.”

Osamu smiles. “I don’t know about that. You seem like someone who learns things really fast.”

 _You think too well of me._ Shinsuke might have said that, had they been back in the studio, one actor to another. Proper. Professional. But they’re on a bus to the mountains, the magnolia trees are flowering, and the warmth of home-made onigiri fills Shinsuke up from the inside. They could be classmates on a school trip, going somewhere new together. Everything seems simpler, out of the city; everything seems clearer under the open light. The taste of ume still lingers on his tongue.

“I can only try,” Shinsuke says.

“Yeah.” Osamu nods. “Me too.”

* * *

The air in the mountains smells so green, Shinsuke feels the ache in his chest, right beneath his ribs. What a _green_ smell is, he could not have described for anyone else. It’s summer on the farm, dew on the grass, soil under his fingertips. Water pooling round his ankles in the rice paddies. Green.

Osamu comes to stand next to him, gazing out at the cooling shadow of Mount Oyama. He doesn’t say anything, just hitches his satchel on his shoulder and zips up his windbreaker, and Shinsuke wraps his arms around himself as the wind rises.

After they check into the small inn at the foot of the mountain, and everyone helps carry the cameras and the heavy equipment in, Osamu’s the first to declare he’s hungry and so Shinsuke finds himself with Atsumu’s arm thrown round his shoulder, shepherding him out the front door together with Akagi and Ginjima.

“The boys are going to dinner,” he calls out over his shoulder to Director Kurosu, who’s going through tomorrow’s call sheet with Oomi, and waves them off without looking out.

“Where are we going?” Shinsuke asks, and Atsumu cocks his head towards Osamu, who’s already leading the way down an unmarked road that appears to lead to nowhere.

“Samu knows.”

Osamu does indeed know. Several turns later, they arrive at an izakaya without a name, and though they start off waiting in line along with every other diner, the proprietress turns out to be a fan of the twins’ and nearly drops her pen and paper pad when she sees them. She ushers them in immediately, gives them a private room and a complimentary plate of grilled squid. When Atsumu takes a selfie with her and uploads it to his SNS, Shinsuke worries she might faint.

“Being recognised is a pain,” Osamu grumbles as he settles in, lifts the lid on the teapot and takes a sniff. “This mugicha smells good though.”

“What? You _want_ to wait outside in the cold?” Atsumu makes a face.

“No, I just don’t like being treated special… least, not when it comes to food. I hope all those people outside get to eat soon.”

Shinsuke reaches for the tea and starts to pour it out for everyone. Osamu’s right. The roasted barley scent is rich and warm. “How did you find this place?”

“It’s his hobby,” says Atsumu. He spears a piece of squid with his chopsticks and puts it into his mouth, talking as he chews. “He likes scouting out hole in the wall type places like this when we go on location. I think he secretly has a food blog.”

Akagi grins. “Man, remember when we were shooting _Who Needs Memories_ in Fujinomiya, and you brought us to that karaage shop? I still dream of that chicken.”

“You should totally start a food blog, Osamu. You’d get a _million_ subscribers,” Ginjima adds.

Osamu stares up at the ceiling. “That’s more than I have on Twitter. If it’s so easy to get a million subscribers, I should just do food blogging and give up this job.”

Atsumu laughs, except he’s drinking his tea at the same time so it comes out like a snort and a cough and then he starts choking, and Ginjima pounds him on the back, and before the conversation goes any further someone comes in to take their orders. Osamu rattles off a long list of dishes for the table that seems, to Shinsuke, to be entirely too much food, but when the yakitori arrives and they dig in, he understands why Osamu’s brought them here.

Towards the end of the night, when their plates are mostly empty, they’re on their third serving of grilled squid and the teapot’s been replaced with beer all around, Atsumu sets down his Kirin with a firm thud and declares, “Let’s play Truth or Lie.”

Osamu raises his eyebrows. “You want to play Truth or Lie with me? You think I don’t know all your answers?”

“Okay, _we’re_ exempted from each other’s rounds—”

“You can play on mine. I don’t think you know all my answers.”

Ginjima snickers, and Atsumu whips his head round to glare at him. “Well, _you_ can start, Ginjima.”

“Okay, uh... number one: I ate a beetle by accident when I was young, and number two: I’ve never been to Hokkaido.”

Atsumu drives a fist into the table. “Hokkaido has to be true. How do you _accidentally_ eat a beetle?”

“I think you could easily accidentally eat a beetle,” Osamu remarks.

Ginjima pushes the bowl of edamame into the centre. “Take a pod, guys. If you think number one is true, put down one bean, if you think it’s number two, put down two.”

Shinsuke, after a moment, sets down two beans, as does Akagi and Osamu. Atsumu unfurls his fist to show two. Ginjima grins. “Drink up, Atsumu.“

“How the _hell_ —”

”I was playing in the yard, and I put one in my mouth, that’s the truth!”

“You nearly did that when we were little, Tsumu—”

“I did not! Lies!”

Osamu merely lets out a quiet snort and slides Atsumu’s beer towards him. Atsumu pretends to gag, but picks it up and knocks back a long sip nonetheless.

“Your turn,” Ginjima says.

Atsumu holds up one finger. “Number one: when we were three, Samu pushed me off a swing and I broke my arm. A second finger. Number two: I cried when watching _Great Teacher Onizuka_.”

Ginjima and Akagi immediately slam down one bean.

“Abstaining,” says Osamu.

Atsumu turns to Shinsuke with raised eyebrows, and Shinsuke, after a moment, puts down two beans. “I don’t think Osamu would do that.”

Atsumu makes a wounded sort of noise. “You think this guy is _that_ nice?”

“No, it’s not that. It just seems like too much effort.”

A moment passes. Atsumu looks at all of them. Then he sighs, a loud, explosive sigh. “Ginjima, Akagi-san, drink.”

“ _No way_ , you cried at GTO?” Akagi says, at the same time Ginjima gapes and blurts out, “Osamu _didn’t_ push you off a swing?”

“It’s as Kita-san says,” Osamu chimes in. “Too much effort. Anyway, Tsumu didn’t need me to push him to break an arm.”

“Also true,” Atsumu mutters. “Well, come on, Samu. Can you make Kita-san drink?”

Osamu pops a piece of squid into his mouth. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Shinsuke looks down at his tiny pyramid of beans and starts arranging them neatly with his chopsticks.

“Number one,” Osamu starts. “I won a Dance Dance Revolution tournament in middle school. Number two: I won an eating competition in high school.”

Atsumu sits bolt upright and frowns. “Wait. I don’t know this one!”

Osamu shrugs. “Not my fault we didn’t go to the same high school.”

“This isn’t fair. _Both_ seem real,” Ginjima protests. Shinsuke sets down one bean.

“Interesting,” Osamu hums.

In the end, they’re split over this one; Ginjima and Akagi put down two beans, while Atsumu, who takes the longest to decide, pushes one to the centre of the table.

“Kita-san and Tsumu are correct,” says Osamu. “Sorry, Akagi-san, Ginjima, you need to drink again.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t win an eating competition,” Akagi mutters. He’s starting to go pink. So is Ginjima, around the ears. Osamu turns to Shinsuke.

“How did you know, Kita-san? Tsumu probably remembers my DDR days, but you? I thought my lie was pretty good.”

Shinsuke shakes his head. “You like eating, but not in a competitive way. You like sharing food with others.”

Osamu stares at him, mouth hanging half-open for a few seconds. Then he smiles. “Over to you, then. I want to learn a truth and a lie about you.”

Shinsuke’s mind goes completely blank. He looks at the four pairs of eyes gazing expectantly back at him, Ginjima’s head slumped onto Osamu’s shoulder and Akagi resting his on the table, and it occurs to Shinsuke that for an actor, his forte is decidedly not in making up lies. Perhaps it is simply that acting has never been about lying, at least not to Shinsuke. It’s always been about truth. The parts of characters that live as a spark of truth within him, and the people he’s known. He accumulates these little kernels of exactitude. He is a tidy collector of them.

Shinsuke clears his throat. “Number one, my height is 175.2 cm. Number 2, my height is 175.3 cm.”

The four pairs of eyes staring at him grow wider.

Akagi is the first one to pick up his mug and drain it. “I yield. Shinsuke is the winner here.”

“Kita-san,” Atsumu breathes, “I think you might actually be a genius at this game.”

“Did I do it wrong?” Shinsuke asks. One of those statements is true. The other is a lie.

Osamu laughs. It’s a warm sound. Atsumu, too, slowly drains the rest of his beer, then flops against Osamu and hiccups softly.

Shinsuke stands. “Right. We need to leave before anyone gets drunk.”

As they’re making their way up the road that leads to the inn, Shinsuke sees Director Kurosu walking back from the other direction, a combini plastic bag in his hand. Ahead of Shinsuke, Atsumu and Osamu are bickering again about who has the room with the better view, Akagi’s yawning and barely managing to walk in a straight line, and Ginjima calls out that he’s going into the onsen first.

Director Kurosu waves, and Shinsuke pauses in the carpark to give him a small bow. As he approaches, he reaches into his plastic bag and tosses Shinsuke a can of milk tea. Shinsuke catches it.

“I’ve always liked having you on a shoot,” says Director Kurosu. “You keep them all grounded.”

He claps Shinsuke on the shoulder, and follows the others into the inn. Shinsuke stands outside for a moment longer, breathing in the cool air. The stars are brilliant out here. They don’t look like this in the city. On a night like this on the farm, he’d be sitting on a step with a lantern, and his grandmother would be there too, coming out with a tray of iced tea and oranges. Teaching him to listen to the crickets chirp, to the wind. Teaching him his first songs.

He’s nothing special. He’d said that to Osamu, on their first day. If he can keep them grounded, it’s only because he keeps his pace steady while they race ahead. The view is something to behold.

* * *

“Oh, Suna was right.”

Shinsuke, doing up his laces on the front porch of the inn, looks up.

The next morning’s dawned just as green as the one before, and Miya Osamu is leaning against the half-open sliding door in his tracksuit and sports shoes, looking every inch of the tennis star he plays. Then he smiles in a decidedly un-Ren-like fashion, and he’s Osamu again.

Suna Rintarou, Shinsuke recalls, is from the same agency as the twins. He gets to his feet. “Good morning.”

“Bright and early as expected, Kita-san.”

“Well, we have to start shooting in a few hours. What was that about Suna?”

Osamu shakes his head. “It’s nothing. He just told me… you were in that drama with him a few years back, right? _Monster Banquet_? He said, no matter how late you all stayed up the night before, you’d always be up with the sun for a jog.”

“Habit,” Shinsuke murmurs.

Osamu does a few ankle rotations, laces his hands together and stretches them overhead. “Can I join you?”

“I’m not a particularly fast runner,” Shinsuke says.

“Neither am I. Atsumu’s the competitive one.”

“And you’re not?”

“Only with him. Shall we? I promise I won’t be annoying.”

Shinsuke doesn’t typically run with company. He can’t think of a reason to refuse, though, so they strike out on the dirt path winding onward and gradually upward away from the inn. The path forks about a hundred metres in, with one trail hiking steeply up a slope, the other winding round its base.

Shinsuke heads down the gentler path, while Osamu’s footsteps fall into a comfortable rhythm next to his. True to his word, he doesn’t say anything, annoying or otherwise. It’s almost as if he’s used to preserving the silence, or that he’s grateful for a rare moment of it, or something like that. Shinsuke ducks into a shadow and doesn’t let his smile show. They pass into a narrow passage lined with maples, rustling overhead, and keep going.

It’s then that Shinsuke feels the first raindrop on his face.

He pauses, and looks up. What slivers of sky he can see in between the treetops is grey. Osamu slows down behind him and follows his gaze, then looks back down at the ground, which is rapidly turning dark and damp.

“We’d better find shelter,” he says.

“We could run back to the inn—” Shinsuke starts, and then the torrent comes down, and Osamu grabs Shinsuke’s arm and breaks into a sprint.

It’s the strangest thing, breathing in the scent of rain on grass and soil and gravel as Shinsuke stops thinking and lets his feet move on their own, lets Osamu lead him up the path until they reach a makeshift sort of shelter, a wooden bench under a sloping roof covered with fallen leaves. It’s pouring in earnest now as they run for it. When they’re safely inside, Shinsuke wrings what water he can out of the hem of his T-shirt, as Osamu takes off his windbreaker and shakes off the raindrops.

“I checked the weather forecast before leaving this morning. It didn’t say anything about rain,” Shinsuke says.

Osamu shrugs. “Things don’t always go as they’re forecast. It’s fine. We have time before the shoot starts.”

He sits down, pats the spot next to him on the bench and looks at Shinsuke. After a moment, Shinsuke takes a seat too.

He is not unused to waiting. He is not unused to standing on the sidelines, biding his time; he has even come to relish that, in its way. He learns a lot, from watching others. But there is waiting, and there is waiting like this, when he can’t plan for the end of it and there is nothing to be done but surrender. Shinsuke can almost hear his grandmother’s voice, so kind in his ears, from miles and miles away. _Ah, Shin-chan._ They’re watching a country storm drench the fields, and there’s a lone dragonfly in hiding on top the lantern in their rafters, and a kite next to Shinsuke that won’t see the sky today. _The gods will have their way._

A low rumble from Osamu’s stomach breaks the silence, and Shinsuke can’t help a small laugh. Osamu’s eyes go wide. “Kita-san, did you just laugh?”

Shinsuke’s smile lingers on his mouth. “Is that surprising?”

“I didn’t think you could laugh. Wait, I guess that sounds silly. I just mean… you’re always so serious. I’m glad I could make you laugh, even if it’s because I’m starving.”

“Didn’t you get enough food last night?”

“I did,” says Osamu, “and I’m hungry anyway. What I wouldn’t give for a bowl of rice right now.”

Shinsuke, hands laced in his lap, glances over at Osamu. He’s leaning back, staring up at the roof. There’s a spiderweb in one corner which, oddly enough, makes Shinsuke feel like they’re not quite so alone in the world.

“Just rice?” he asks.

“Yeah. Rice is the best food. If I’m feeling fancy, an egg. But I don’t usually feel fancy.”

“You should come out to our farm sometimes. My grandmother would be so excited to meet you. She watches all your dramas.”

Osamu’s eyebrows shoot up. “What? I think I’d be more excited to meet her. Anyway, I bet she watches the dramas for Tsumu, not me.”

Shinsuke studies Osamu’s face. It’s funny how when he looks at them together, it doesn’t feel like he’s seeing double at all. Even more so, now that he’s looking at Osamu alone. A matched set, Miya Atsumu and Miya Osamu. That’s how the world’s known them for so long. They even have a joint fan club rather than individual ones. And yet, looking at Osamu like this, it’s clear how very distinct they are, how the idea of a _favourite twin_ doesn’t really make any sense at all. Might as well call favourites between Shinsuke and Ginjima, or any two other people in the world.

Osamu holds a hand out beyond the shelter. The rain forms a little pool in the hollow of his palm. “It’s not getting any lighter, huh.”

“No.” Shinsuke looks at his watch. “We still have an hour before your call time, fortunately.”

“You know my call time?”

It seems tedious for Shinsuke to say, yes, he knows the whole call sheet by heart, and so he simply stares at Osamu until Osamu laughs.

He stretches forward, extends his legs till the rain patters upon the tips of his shoes, and then he starts to hum. A tune for spring. A chord progression that makes Shinsuke’s fingers tingle and his throat start to well up.

“Where did you hear that song?” he asks.

Osamu grins. "Surprised?”

“I guess I shouldn’t be. I suppose Atsumu has a copy, since he was in the MV.”

“Mmm. We do have a copy of your CD at home,” Osamu murmurs. He looks down. “Will you sing it for me?”

Shinsuke opens his mouth, then closes it.

“Come on,” says Osamu, and he elbows Shinsuke lightly in the side and starts humming again, and when Shinsuke finds his voice, mellow and earthy, it somehow doesn’t surprise him that Osamu’s harmony is the perfect backing track.

* * *

By the time they finally make it back to the inn, it’s still drizzling. Atsumu’s standing by the front porch with his phone in his hand.

“Hey.” Osamu waves, and Atsumu looks up.

“Samu, you dumbass, I just tried to call you but you left your phone behind... what happened to you both?”

Shinsuke exchanges a glance with Osamu, settles, eventually, for, “The rain was sudden.”

“And not on the weather forecast,” Osamu adds.

“Tell me about it. We’re switching up our shoot order because of that. Come on, Samu, I need you. We’re doing the scene where we talk in the onsen first.”

“Oh good. At least I get a hot bath,” Osamu says.

“You _need_ a hot bath. See you later, Kita-san.”

Shinsuke nods as Atsumu starts dragging Osamu back towards their rooms. Osamu looks over his shoulder, gives Shinsuke a parting grin and mouths, _thanks_.

What he is being thanked for, Shinsuke does not know. All he can say, as he makes his way back slowly to his own room for his own hot shower, is that there is a sense of gratitude welling up within him as well, for something he cannot put a name to.

Later, in between scenes, he volunteers to take over the sustenance run from one of the production assistants, who all have their work cut out for them today. There’s a little souvenir and snack stand just down the road that they passed by last night on the way to the izakaya. Shinsuke stops by there, buys an extra onigiri and two pairs of socks. They have the silhouette of Mount Oyama around the toes. It amuses him, and anyway, if Osamu’s socks are anything like Shinsuke’s after this morning, they need a good wash and can’t be worn on the bus ride back.

* * *

After the mountains, Shinsuke isn’t involved in any more offsite shoots. All the others are smaller scenes around the city—in cafes, the arcade, Ueno Park in the pink of spring. But Shinji-senpai’s role is to keep Kousaka Hiro on the straight and narrow in music club, occasionally dispense wise advice, and play the guitar.

After the mountains, shooting becomes more sparse too. They’ve shot the bulk of their principal photography by then, and the twins both have other commitments; a talk show there, a variety game show here, a magazine shoot on another day. In addition to Adidas, they’ve recently picked up a sponsorship from a company that, apparently, makes very high-tech vacuum cleaners.

“They don’t _only_ make vacuum cleaners,” Osamu tells Shinsuke the next day. “They also make very good… what do you call them? Those gadgets you use on your face to make your pores smaller? Tsumu asked if he could model that instead. But they said no, the vacuum cleaner sales need a boost.”

Osamu’s got his phone out, and he’s showing Shinsuke photos of Atsumu doing his best to vacuum a living room, and only the need to hold still for the makeup artist keeps Shinsuke from breaking into a smile.

It’s strange to think that this is their first and only scene together. As they get onto the set of the music room and start blocking out their movements, going through their lines, Shinsuke feels like they’ve been working side by side for a long time.

“We have some time. Do you need another run through?” Director Kurosu asks.

Shinsuke looks over at Osamu, who's already shaking his head.

“Thank you. We’re good to go,” says Shinsuke. He moves into position, taking up his usual seat beside Hiro’s drums, closes his eyes and slips into Shinji’s skin with his next breath. _Action_ , he’s dimly aware of hearing, and then Ren comes onto the scene.

* * *

> _INT. UNIVERSITY MUSIC CLUB ROOM — DUSK._
> 
> _TANIZAKI SHINJI is alone in the club room, practising guitar, when KOUSAKA REN appears in the doorway._

He’s stayed back after everyone else has gone to practise the last song, a new one for their club. They’ve got the university music festival in less than a week, and the shamisen club is sounding really good, and the last thing Shinji wants is for light music to be shown up in front of them. Hiro should be here too, but Aoi had come by and asked if he would help her move some things in the tennis club storeroom because she couldn’t find Ren anywhere, and Shinji had let him go because from the look on his face, he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on band practice anyway.

The sound of a firm footstep from the doorway makes him look up. “Kousaka… Ren-kun?”

It _is_ him. He’s in a blazer, shirt half-untucked, a satchel slung round his shoulders. He’s never made an appearance here before. Hiro says Ren doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. Shinji likes to tell him everyone has a musical bone somewhere in them, if you listen hard enough.

“Are you looking for your brother?” Shinji asks.

Ren nods, slips his hands into his pockets and leans against the open door.

“He’s—not here.”

Shinji had almost said, _he’s gone off with Aoi-san_ , but that love triangle’s widely known enough all over university that he knows better than to get himself involved.

“He’s with Aoi, isn’t he,” Ren mutters.

Out of his tennis uniform, without that racket he wields like a weapon, Kousaka Ren doesn’t seem quite so cold. He looks a little lost. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, gazes back out and down the corridor as though Hiro might suddenly appear, but Hiro doesn’t, and Ren and Shinji know he’s not going to appear.

Shinji stands up. He taps the chair in front of the drums with his knuckles. “Since you’re here, you can do what Hiro was supposed to help me do. Can you keep a beat?”

Ren stares at him. “What?”

“Keep a beat. Come in. Sit down.”

“Hey, I don’t play any instruments. I’m not Hiro—”

“You don’t have to be,” says Shinji.

Ren stands on the threshold a few moments more, then enters the room, puts his bag down and takes the drumstick Shinji passes to him. With the other one, Shinji starts to drum out a beat, and after a while, Ren follows.

“Good. Keep doing that.”

Shinji returns to his guitar and strums his opening chords, playing a few more bars of the song until he’s gone through one verse and the chorus, and then he stops. He looks up, smiles at Ren, who’s still holding on to the drumstick.

“You have a good sense of rhythm. Sure you don’t want to switch clubs?”

Ren shakes his head. He stands up and slings his satchel back over his shoulder. “I’ll stick to tennis. But… thanks for this, Shinji-senpai.”

“Come back anytime,” says Shinji.

* * *

“And… cut!”

Shinsuke, still holding Osamu’s gaze, turns to look at Director Kurosu. He nods and them both a thumbs up. “Got it in one take. Good job, Kita, Osamu.”

Osamu grins and holds one hand out to Shinsuke, palm up. Shinsuke meets it in a low five, and starts packing his guitar back into its case.

“Done for the day, Kita-san?” Osamu asks. He stretches, lets out a loud yawn and rubs the back of his neck.

“Yes. Do you need more food? I can run to Family Mart for you.”

Osamu shakes his head, opens his satchel and shows it to Shinsuke. There’s an egg sandwich, another bento box and a water bottle inside. Shinsuke smiles. “Is that what Kousaka Ren-kun carries around in his bag?”

“Nah, he probably has boring stuff like KT tape and muscle rub… but I don’t have any scenes that need me to open this bag, so. You get your guitar, I get my food.”

“Resourceful,” Shinsuke remarks. “Hang in there.”

“Wait. My next scene’s with Tsumu on our apartment set. I’ll walk with you.”

The apartment set is one floor down. Atsumu’s probably already there with Oomi and the wardrobe guys who have Osamu's change of clothes. Osamu shrugs off the blazer, slings it over one arm and follows Shinsuke off the music club set.

The second cameraman’s still there just beyond the doorway, where he was filming into the club room from the corridor. He’s playing back the footage, and Shinsuke slows down to watch a few seconds of it as they pass by. There he is with Osamu, showing Ren the beat. Shinsuke pauses. He doesn’t, as a rule, much like watching himself on camera, but this scene felt good while he was doing it.

“Oooh,” says Osamu, “we look great. Look at me. I’m a natural drummer.”

“You guys had amazing chemistry,” the second cameraman remarks. “Sure it’s your first time acting together?”

Shinsuke nods. Osamu starts to hum along as Shinji, on camera, begins strumming, then a production assistant waves at him from the lift lobby and he sighs. “Looks like I gotta go. See you tomorrow.”

“See you,” says Shinsuke. He lingers till the song finishes, then takes his leave with a small bow to the rest of the crew, and thanks them for their hard work. The music loops in his mind all the way back to his apartment.

* * *

Late spring doesn’t feel all that different from summer and yet, there comes a time when one season warms unmistakably into the other, when Shinsuke puts his hands together in his apartment and murmurs an _itadakimasu_ to himself, looks up at the way the sunlight falls across the lone bowl of rice on his table. Thinks of fields far away, wishes he could share this meal. This, and perhaps more.

The turn in the weather means they’re shooting more outdoor scenes now, the last of their principal photography. Stargazing evenings, playgrounds and rooftops, summer festivals at night. Tomorrow, they wrap. Tonight, they set off the fireworks over the school field, once for the camera, and then twice and over again to celebrate their almost-finish.

Shinsuke doesn’t have many scenes here, save for a brief, silent appearance in the background of the festival along with some music club members. When he’s done with his last one, he goes to sit by the sidelines with Osamu, who hands him a cucumber skewer. “Otsukare.”

“That’s my line. All I did was toss rings. You had a whole fight with your brother.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to be difficult,” says Osamu, and grins.

Shinsuke raises an arm and sweeps a stray bug off his sleeve. They’ve dressed him in a simple off-white yukata with comfortable geta, which he’s grateful for, but it’s still fussier attire than he’d like. “I’ll go get changed.”

Osamu reaches out to grab his arm. “Don’t. Keep me company. I don’t want to be the only idiot still dressed like this.”

“You have more scenes to shoot. I don’t,” Shinsuke points out.

“The yukata suits you.”

“You sound like my grandmother.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

Shinsuke, after a moment, settles back down and takes a bite of cucumber, then another. It’s cool and refreshing in this balmy night. The street in front of them, just outside the studio, is decked out in the full summer festival setup, lights and lanterns and rows of food and game stalls, more than a few of them genuine. It had taken Shinsuke more than a few ring tosses before his first success. _It’s fine,_ Assistant Director Oomi reassured him, that that was just what they wanted. Shinji was a guitarist, not some kind of sharpshooter; it was normal for him to struggle with some things.

They’re shooting Aoi and her friends now, walking through the festival where she’ll bump into Hiro, sporting a black eye from his fight with Ren. Osamu had one to match too, until five minutes ago when a makeup assistant cleaned it off his face and left him with a tinge of bruising pink on one side of his jaw.

Osamu leans back on his hands, looks up towards the string of lights above them. “Hey, Kita-san. You know what else Suna told me about you? When he told me about the waking up to run thing?”

Shinsuke shakes his head.

“He said, _Kita-san’s too perfect_. That you never missed a line, that you got every take done in one, that you block your scenes so precisely you could probably take over if anything ever happened to the director. I asked him, if someone like that really existed, why wasn’t he a huge star by now?”

“I don’t want to be a huge star,” Shinsuke murmurs.

“Mmm. I realised. Why did you stop playing music after ‘Foxglove’? It didn’t do badly.”

To be precise, Shinsuke’s one single to date had done neither exceptionally well nor exceptionally badly. It had come in right around the middle of the charts, he had done a few roadshows and signed a respectable number of CDs, after which he had been happy enough to step back from the recording studio and the promotional circus of music production.

“Who said I stopped playing music?”

Osamu tilts his head to look at him.

“I like playing music. It doesn’t mean I have to make it a career. I tried it once. That was good enough… but I never stopped playing.”

“I guess that’s true. You still play so smoothly. Every time I watch you recording one of the light music club scenes, I feel like I’m at a private concert.”

“You did get a private concert,” Shinsuke points out. “You made me sing for you.”

“Lucky me. So why acting, then?”

“It’s something I can do to support my family,” says Shinsuke. He pauses as Director Kurosu calls _cut_ , and the crew run in to start changing the set for the next scene, taking down signboards and swapping out the stall dressing. Takoyaki for yakisoba, goldfish scooping for the ring toss game.

“And I think, I just like the routine and repetition. Memorising lines. Building my character out of small things. It feels good when I get it right.”

Osamu laughs. _Warm._ The same laugh Shinsuke once heard in an izakaya in Kanagawa, except now it’s just the two of them and there’s no beer involved. Shinsuke stores it in his memory: the combination of notes, the chord it makes across strings stretched in fairy lights against the night sky. “I’ve never heard anyone describe acting that way.”

“The process seems more… intuitive, for you both.”

“I think we just fell into it before we were old enough to really understand anything. You know Atsumu and I have been doing this since we were children, right? I mean, we didn’t really get any big roles till the last couple of years, but we’ve been at this a long time. Aran-kun knows.”

Shinsuke nods. Osamu doesn’t say anything for a while, just twirls his empty skewer in one hand, looks down and starts picking at a loose thread in the hem of his navy blue yukata. So Shinsuke says, “Do you like it?”

Osamu shrugs. Too quickly, like he’s been waiting for someone to ask him that question. “I don’t _dislike_ it. But I don’t love it like Tsumu does. And I’m turning twenty-six this year. I don’t know how much longer I can continue playing high schoolers and university students.”

“You said _I_ , not _we_.”

“I think Tsumu could continue doing it forever,” says Osamu, with a small smile.

“What do you want to do, then?”

Osamu pauses a moment, takes a deep breath. “I want to take the money I’ve saved up and go study in culinary school.”

This, Shinsuke can tell the instant Osamu says it, is probably the first time he’s said it out loud to anyone. With the words out there, Osamu raises his head. He clasps his hands tight together, as if grasping a firework or a prayer between them, something that might sputter out and die if he takes his eyes off it.

“It sounds like you’ve been thinking about this a long time,” says Shinsuke.

Osamu nods, still silent.

“You’ll be great.”

Osamu lets out a long, slow sigh, then turns to Shinsuke. “Hey, I have an idea. Let’s go into business together in the future. Your rice, and my cooking. I have a feeling that I’ll be able to make really amazing food if I use your rice.”

Shinsuke raises his eyebrows. “You knew? That I want to go back to farming, in future?”

“It’s all over your face, Kita-san. When you talk about your family farm, and your granny. You love them.”

“Takes one rice maniac to know another, I guess.”

Osamu’s smile softens. They’re a long way, Shinsuke knows, from crickets and sweat and a breeze that smells of green, from dirt crumbling between his fingers. They’re a long way from the height of summer. This yukata is lighter than he should really be wearing, for the hour. Shinsuke should go get changed.

He doesn’t, just yet. He stays, until they finish setting up for the next scene and Osamu goes to get his makeup touched up, and Shinsuke finishes the last bit of his skewer, thinks of his grandmother’s spicy cucumber recipe.

* * *

Wrap day dawns clear and crisp, the promise of a warmer season ahead when Shinsuke steps out of his apartment, guitar slung over his back, for the last time.

He has the last scene in the filming roster. It’s one of the earliest in the show—a solo scene where he’s setting up in the light music club room. He organises the scores in the cupboard, sets the instruments up, and takes a broom to sweep out the corners as he waits for the new kouhai to arrive. It’s a simple scene. They’ve kept it for last, most likely, because his schedule is the most open of the supporting cast’s; he doesn’t have all the scheduling conflicts that the twins do, and this scene’s just him. No dialogue, nothing else.

It’s a good scene. He feels _right_ doing it, closing out the series filming with this. When Director Kurosu calls out _cut_ for the final time, and whoops and cheers ring out across the set, Shinsuke sets down the broom, lets out a breath, and smiles to himself.

Osamu is not here today. He’s got some voiceover work, Atsumu tells Shinsuke. “If you hear some asshole bear mascot advertising ramen on your TV soon, that’s him.”

“I think Osamu would have fun advertising ramen,” says Shinsuke.

Atsumu whips out his phone and starts taking photos of the celebratory spread the production team’s laid out, trays of onigiri and sandwiches and mini chocolate croissants. “He’ll be pissed off that he missed all this.”

Shinsuke opens a bottle of iced peach tea, fills up two plastic cups and hands one to Atsumu, who takes it, then holds it out to Shinsuke with an expectant grin. Shinsuke clinks his own against it. “Thank you for everything.”

Atsumu downs his drink in one long breath, throws his arm around Shinsuke and pulls his phone out of his front jacket pocket. “It was great working with you, Shinji-senpai.”

“It was good to work with you again too, Atsumu.”

“Again?” Atsumu blinks.

“My MV… though I suppose we didn’t really _work together_ , back then.”

“Oh god, that was ages ago. Hey, don’t be a stranger. Let’s exchange numbers. You’re not on SNS or anything, it’ll be a pain to lose touch with you.”

So Shinsuke, bemused, lets Atsumu flip his phone open and goes home with an extra name in his contact list, complete with sparkly emoji.

* * *

**miyasamu:** hey. kita-san?  
 **miyasamu:** it’s me. osamu.  
 **miyasamu:** atsumu passed me your number. hope thats ok

 **kitashinsuke:** Hello, Osamu. It is certainly okay.  
 **kitashinsuke:** I’m glad to hear from you. How was the ramen voiceover job?

 **miyasamu:** oh man they gave me a free 5-pack of ramen i scored big

**_miyasamu sent a picture_ **

**kitashinsuke:** Congratulations. I’m very happy for you.

 **miyasamu:** :D

* * *

Between being a stranger and being a friend, Shinsuke isn’t sure he’s ever particularly excelled at one or the other. He isn’t sure, either, that the opposite of being a stranger is being a friend. _Don’t be a stranger._ Does that mean, _be a friend_?

He brings a fruit basket round to Aran’s, the day after they wrap. Aran’s back on his feet now, hobbling around without crutches most of the time, though he hasn’t had his cast off yet.

“Thanks for covering for me. I owe you one.”

“It was my pleasure,” says Shinsuke. He goes to the kitchen, firmly takes the teapot out of Aran’s hand and steers him to the living room, where Aran sinks into the couch with a groan.

“I can’t wait to get back to work. It’s been so boring. Did you have fun?”

“Yes.” Shinsuke nods. “I did.”

Aran raises his eyebrows. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that so easily. I thought the Miyas might drive you mad.”

Shinsuke puts the kettle on, opens the cupboard overhead and takes out the sencha leaves. “They were fine. Osamu was very nice.”

“Osamu’s as much of a menace as his brother. He just has you fooled.”

Shinsuke pours the water into the teapot, sets it down to steep and gives Aran a long, wordless glance. Aran raises his hands in mock surrender and laughs.

“Okay, I’ll grant, you’re not easily fooled. But anyway, remember what I said about the quiet ones.”

Shinsuke brings the tea over to the living room, and Aran turns on the TV. It’s a rerun of a variety show that aired last week. The twins are on it. This isn’t, in itself, a notable coincidence; the twins are so popular now they seem to be just about everywhere, if not on a show or interview then in some kind of ad spot. Atsumu, in spite of himself, does a commendable job playing a harried university student who needs to vacuum his room before his parents come to visit.

They’re playing Dance Dance Revolution on this episode. Shinsuke smiles. “Osamu will win.”

So he does, and Atsumu has to do the forfeit, which is to stick his hand into a bucket of ice water for twenty whole seconds. He complains non-stop. Osamu smirks the whole time and counts extra slowly.

“See?” Aran points. “A menace.”

Shinsuke looks at Osamu’s face. All he can think of is the cool of a spring breeze, lights in the sky, rain on his skin. Footsteps steady by his side. How it feels to breathe easy, where the air is green.

* * *

**_miyasamu sent a picture_ **

**miyasamu:** i got so many likes on this one. wwww  
 **miyasamu:** so many _who is he???_

Shinsuke clicks on the attachment.

It’s him. In his white bamboo-patterned yukata with the deep red obi, walking down the summer festival set with a bag of goldfish in his hand, cameras to his left and the lights behind him throwing his face half in shadow. Shinsuke doesn’t know when Osamu took this photo. It is, he grants, artistically framed, even if he can’t see any particular appeal in how he looks here.

He pulls up Osamu’s Instagram account. _Who is this mysterious stranger at a festival? Sneak peek behind the scenes! Catch me and my brother on TV Asahi tonight to find out about our new drama, Tell Me What You Want!_

 **kitashinsuke:** “Mysterious stranger”? Did you write that?

 **miyasamu:** thats you. enigma kita-san

 **kitashinsuke:** I’m not enigmatic. Viewers will be disappointed.

 **miyasamu:** hmmMM we will see

 **kitashinsuke:** Thank you for the picture, though.

He saves the photo, looks at the scrollbar to the right of their message history. It’s smaller than it should be, for someone whose number he’s had for just a few months. It’s not that Osamu is overly talkative, or sends him inane messages. Shinsuke looks forward to hearing from him. He likes to hear about Osamu’s meals, about recipes that Osamu’s dreaming up, about ingredients he read about and wants to try one day. Shinsuke, in turn, sends him notes from the farm. It’s orange season. The fruit trees are doing well, and so are the cabbages.

He’ll be back in the city before too long, but this respite at the farm has been a welcome break, and it’s nice to have someone to share it with in some way.

Shinsuke sets his phone down, glances at the guitar leaning against the living room wall. He’d left his guitar in Tokyo. The one here in his grandmother’s house is an old one, the guitar he’d learned his first chords on when he was nine. He picks it up, sits on the back step and gets to tuning the strings. Outside, the begonias are beginning to bloom. The open windows sing in summertime, the faint drizzle of the rainy season, and from a distance, the trilling of sparrows.

As Shinsuke starts strumming, he realises his fingers have found the opening to ‘Foxglove’, something they haven’t done for a while. It was here, beside the sunlit fields of his grandmother’s farm, that he began to write this song. Gazing out at the grey horizon, Shinsuke lets a memory surface and linger; a memory of singing under a shelter covered with fallen leaves.

He lets the last bars fade out, sets down his guitar, and goes to the cabinet by the TV. There it is: his DVD of the ‘Foxglove’ MV, carefully labelled in his grandmother’s hand. He hasn’t watched it in years. He blows the dust off the old DVD player, hooks it up to the TV and pops the disc in.

The MV opens in a field that doesn’t look all that different from the farm. Only daisies instead of rice, rolling hills instead of a highway to the west. He’s standing in the middle of them, face in profile, guitar slung round his shoulder as he looks out towards the sunset. Then the song starts, and it cuts to a scene in the city, where a boy in a brown jacket walks through the door of a cafe.

Shinsuke had been seventeen, when he released this single. That would have made the Miya twins sixteen. Old enough, perhaps, that he should have remembered them sooner, but he’d never spent much time watching this MV, since it had been a project largely directed by his record company. He’d just gone to shoot the country scenes and been done with it.

The back view of the boy is all he sees at first. As Shinsuke’s voice starts on the first verse of the song, singing about missed connections on a spring day, the camera follows the boy through the cafe where he sits down alone at a booth. A waitress comes to him. He looks up at her and murmurs his order, mouth moving so you can make out the shape of _coffee, please_.

Shinsuke picks up the remote control and slams his finger on the _pause_ button. From his other hand, the DVD case clatters to the floor.

After a few seconds, he rewinds, hits play again and stops on the same frame. He’s not mistaken. He’s sure he isn’t.

“Baa-chan,” he calls.

His grandmother steps out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She smiles when she sees the screen. “Ah, that song! It was so lovely, Shin-chan. It’s nice to see you listening to it again.”

“Did you know one of the Miya twins was in the MV?” he asks.

She blinks at the boy’s face, frozen on the TV. Her eyes widen. “Oh! You’re right! It was so long ago. I never realised.”

“Do you know which one of them it is?”

She stares a little longer, then shakes her head. “I think it’s Osamu-kun, but I can’t tell for sure.”

Shinsuke presses play, lets the MV continue. The waitress brings the boy his coffee. His grandmother gushes fondly about how handsome the Miya twins were at sixteen, how well they’ve grown up. Shinsuke watches the boy’s hand curl around the handle of his cup. Sees the way he looks at the girl sliding into the booth opposite him, and thinks, he knows that look.

* * *

He had called Osamu on the train back to Tokyo. “Can I meet you in a few hours?”

Osamu sounded surprised, a little out of breath, like he’d been running to get the phone. “Sure. Hey, I’m making ochazuke. Want to come over?”

Yes. _Yes._ Shinsuke did, and so Osamu sent him his address. Five hours later, nearly midnight and too late to pretend it is a decent hour to call on anyone, a security guard in an apartment in Yoyogi buzzes Shinsuke in and gives him a bow. Shinsuke enters the lift, hits the button for the 11th floor and takes a step back.

The lift ride is interminable. Shinsuke, for all his skill at waiting, feels he has been waiting a very long time indeed. He takes a deep breath, hands tightening round the incongruous plastic bag full of cabbage that he had brought back from the farm.

Osamu opens the door the minute Shinsuke rings the bell. The smell of dashi wafts through to the corridor. Shinsuke’s mouth waters. He had not realised how hungry he was. They stand there, face to face, for a moment, not saying anything, until Shinsuke’s stomach rumbles and Osamu laughs and there it is again, that warm laugh, plucking the same melodious chord it did at the turn of the season.

“Come in,” he says. “I’ll heat up a bowl of ochazuke for you. It’s good to see you, Kita-san.”

Shinsuke enters. Osamu’s place appears extraordinarily normal, for an idol at the height of his popularity. Aside from the rack of sunglasses and baseball caps near the door, and the DVDs lining the shelf beside his TV console, it looks like any other well lived-in apartment. There’s a Wii hooked up to the TV, a stack of cookbooks and intriguingly, what looks like a few brochures from culinary schools on the coffee table. There’s also a pair of worn-out sneakers with Mount Oyama socks in them, and a forest green sweater hanging behind the door. Osamu had been wearing that sweater, the first day they met. Except, that hadn’t been the first day they met at all.

Shinsuke puts the cabbage down on the counter, watches Osamu’s back as he moves around the kitchen. He wants to say, _I brought you this all the way from my family farm._ Wants to say, _I picked it out myself. The best of the crop._ Wants to say, _looking at your back like this makes my chest hurt._

What comes out of his mouth instead is, “Why didn’t you tell me it was you in my MV?”

Osamu, ladle in hand, stills. Freezes, infinitesimal. He doesn’t turn around. Then he sighs and drops the ladle into the pot. “Will you believe I got shy?”

“It seems hard to believe. But go on.”

“I told Tsumu not to tell you, either. Don’t get mad at him. He didn’t exactly lie to you. He’s really good at that, you know, half-lies—”

“Osamu,” says Shinsuke, “I didn’t come over in the middle of the night right after getting off a five-hour train ride to hear you talk about your brother.”

Osamu lets out a soft, shaky laugh. “I guess not. Well, when I was sixteen, I got this gig to be in a MV. I didn’t know the singer. I didn’t even know the song that would be playing over my scenes. But when I heard it for the first time, and when I saw the singer perform it live at Ikebukuro, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t get his performance out of my head. He played with so much confidence. I wanted to be like him. I looped the song so much that summer I think Tsumu went mad.”

Shinsuke can’t think of any other way to put this, so he says, “Are you telling me you’ve had a crush on me for ten years?”

Osamu whirls around then. His face is flushed, but his gaze is steady, fixed on Shinsuke, painfully honest and open. “No, it wasn’t like that! I admired you. I wasn’t _in love_ with you. I guess you were like, on a pedestal? But you’re not anymore. I know you as a person now. I know you don’t know how to tell a truth and a lie. I know you fret when the weather forecast isn’t accurate. I know your voice is even nicer _a cappella_. I know you like houjicha and umeboshi and that static shock startles you. And I…”

His voice trails off. He presses his lips together, looks down, as if the kitchen tiles are suddenly incredibly fascinating.

Shinsuke exhales. He walks over to where Osamu’s leaning against the counter, steps so close he can see the movement in Osamu’s throat as he swallows, and then he reaches up to rest a hand on Osamu’s cheek.

“I know you too,” he says. “And I like you. I like you, Miya Osamu.”

“Kita-san,” Osamu breathes, “can I—”

But Osamu never finishes the question, because Shinsuke’s on his tiptoes now and he has Osamu’s face in his hands and he’s kissing him, and Osamu’s arms are sliding round Shinsuke’s waist, and they’re both done waiting at last.

* * *

Osamu’s offered to host the watch party for the premiere of _Tell Me What You Want_ , and no one has seen fit to put up even a polite protest, as the offer comes with home-made onigiri and gyoza. They’re all gathered in one overcrowded living room, Shirofuku helping Osamu in the kitchen, Atsumu, Ginjima and Akagi getting way too competitive at Mario Kart, Shinsuke on the couch catching up with Kurosu and Oomi. Aran’s here too, cast now off and already shooting his next project.

If he is honest, Shinsuke’s relieved his substitute days are over. He likes this work well enough, but there are other things he wants to do, too.

“Food’s up,” Osamu calls out. “Someone change the channel. We’re fifteen minutes to showtime.”

Atsumu and Ginjima nearly trip over each other bolting towards the table. Shinsuke takes his time. He likes everything Osamu makes, so it doesn’t matter to him which onigiri flavour he ends up with. But as he starts to stand, Osamu catches his eye and nods towards the balcony instead.

So Shinsuke quietly pushes the sliding door open, walks out into a bracing autumn night. After a few minutes, he hears footsteps come up beside him, and Osamu presses an onigiri into his hands. Shinsuke takes a bite. _Ume._

“It’s good,” he says. “Thank you.”

Osamu leans out over the railing, holds one hand out palm up. Shinsuke slides his free hand into it and laces their fingers together.

“I got accepted into a culinary school,” says Osamu. “In Kobe.”

He’s squeezing Shinsuke’s hand now, and Shinsuke can’t tell if his chest is pounding fit to burst or if it’s Osamu’s pulse nestled in his, breathing through his body. It feels like it could be either. Could be both. Shinsuke squeezes back.

“Congratulations. Have you told Atsumu yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll find a time to tell him soon. But I wanted you to be the first to know.”

How strongly that heart beats. How filling this food is, how it warms him right up from the inside.

Osamu looks at him, a hopeful light in his eyes. “The next time you go to the farm, can I come with you?”

“If you hadn’t asked, I would have asked you,” says Shinsuke, and smiles.

* * *

The drama is a hit. They go straight to the top of the ratings chart with their premiere episode, and the second does even better. For the first time in years, Shinsuke has variety show and interview requests, and Osamu keeps showing him SNS posts about _how hot Shinji-senpai is_ , which Shinsuke honestly doesn’t get and which seem to amuse Osamu no end. A guitar club in Shinjuku has invited him to perform for their members. A washing machine company has asked him to be their spokesperson.

“Shinji-senpai is a very popular character,” says a reporter from across a cafe table, towards the end of a magazine interview. “I’m sure you have a lot of new fans now.”

Shinsuke inclines his head respectfully. “I’m very grateful. Thank you everyone for supporting me and _Tell Me What You Want_. Please continue to watch for more exciting surprises.”

“What about your next roles? Do you have any new projects that your fans can look forward to?”

Shinsuke takes a deep breath. The answer is so clear in his mind. The time has come to say it, he supposes. It’s never been in question anyway.

“I’m going to take a break from acting. I plan to go back to the family farm for a while. But it’s not like the road only ever runs forward, so who knows what the future holds? Maybe I’ll be inspired to write some new music.”

The reporter nods. “Ah! A love song, like ‘Foxglove’?”

“Yes,” Shinsuke says. “Yes, it could be a love song.”

When he steps out, Osamu is waiting for him, a baseball cap pulled low over his face. He looks up and smiles, and Shinsuke hears a new chord in the air, ringing true and bright.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This fic exists because 1) I wanted to have a fun time writing an idol AU, and 2) I wanted to fulfil a long-held bucket list dream of writing Osakita from Kita POV. It wound up really snowballing into a life of its own. The more I wrote, the more I grew so fond of this little pet project (that turned out not so little in the end) and I hope you had fun reading it too!
> 
> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lightveils) ♥


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